


Après moi, le déluge

by cicak



Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Alana and Margot are my favourites, Canon Disabled Character, Canon Lesbian Relationship, Cunnilingus, Disabled Character, F/F, Lesbian Sex, Physical Disability, conspicuous consumption as courtship, femmes in love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-07-10
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 17:07:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,187
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4313322
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cicak/pseuds/cicak
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The new Alana has a spine reinforced with steel pins, and a pelvis completely built from scratch. Margot Verger makes her first statement an innuendo, and doesn't stop there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Après moi, le déluge

Every step she takes these days hurts. The cane she carries was a present from an anonymous benefactor - she does not deny that it came from Hannibal, or at least from his bank account. The standard grip is shaped like the curve of the human ilium, the part of her body that was shattered when she fell. It is entirely coincidence, the way the fleshy part of the human thumb fits into the same curve as its pelvis, but her mysterious benefactor knew it.

Her injuries were conducive with falling from a second floor window. In another life it would be attempted murder, an act of malice, something that happened to her, rather than something that merely happened. Instead the perpetrator is dead, and instead of the active language of blame, it became a passive fall.

Recovery is a nasty, mean business. They tell her at first she may make a full recovery, and then, after some setbacks, that if she is lucky she won't spend the rest of her life in a wheelchair. She is lucky - she is out of the chair within six months. Her physical therapist says that she is a star. His smile is wide, pure white teeth a stark contrast against his dark skin, and it hurts her that she feels she will never smile like that again. Never move as easily as he does when their session finishes. Never be the dispassionate medical professional again. Her emotions are too raw, she needs a lifetime of therapy before she is allowed inside another person’s head again.

She bides much of her time while recovering plotting wild methods of revenge, but once she can move from a prone position and can be friends with something other than the water stain on the ceiling, she takes stock of the tatters of her life, desperately needing something to do. The old Alana had taken out insurance to protect her livelihood, ironically at Hannibal Lecter's insistence, and so she never needs work again. She gets a significant payout from the FBI, and her health insurance covers her medical costs, and her practice is taken over by an old friend from Chicago, who buys her out eagerly. She is discharged a wealthy woman, set up for life and without a single thing to do.

When she comes home from the hospital there is a voicemail from her local boutique telling her that the new collections are in. The old Alana wore exclusively Diane von Furstenberg wrap dresses for work, new designs ordered twice a year with replacements for her beloved Salvatore Ferragamo boots every other year. In her downtime she continued the look of comfortable, serviceable fashion, mostly bought on shopping trips with girlfriends more passionate about the new collections than she could ever be.

The new Alana has a spine reinforced with steel pins, and a pelvis completely built from scratch. She lay still for months in a succession of ugly hospital gowns and bandages. She can only move with deliberate thought and mental effort. Her back is scarred from broken glass, and her lungs are ruined from the pneumonia she caught from her immune system being depressed after lying in the pouring rain for hours. Her muscles are either completely wasted away or bulky from physical therapy. Her boots no longer fit her new calves, and her silk dresses hang wrong, no matter how tightly she pulls the sash around herself.

She is still on bed rest, fussed over by her mother and aunt, but slowly, with the help of her tablet, a pile of boxes and bags appear by her bed. They are beautiful things, huge boxes from department stores give way over time to smaller ones with unfamiliar designer labels, boxes plastered with customs forms from Japanese consignment stores filled with expensive exclusives from the mid 90s to hand wrapped boxes from young designers who make beautiful things to order in far corners of the internet and include handwritten notes that they would make anything for her, anything at all. As structure slowly returns to her life, she brings tailoring into her world.

The first time she visits the Verger ranch and sees Margot, sitting astride a horse, it is the first time she has spoken to someone in her new incarnation. Margot has a demeanor that is all innuendo and cunning, something Alana realises is a Verger family trait. They are hilariously fucked up children. She meets Mason and offers her services, but she knows he doesn't need her. He wants her though, leering at her and licking his non existent lips. He does not offer her a chocolate, he does not want her to be on her knees for him. She wants it to be because he recognises another broken bird, but she suspects its because he wants her for completeness, not for what she represents. He wants the full set, to build a team of people fucked up by Hannibal Lecter, fucked up superheroes united by a common enemy. He wants to bring together all their miseries, his sister's, hers, Chilton's and ultimately Will's, as if to level up into a superweapon that could destroy the giant monster that is Hannibal Lecter.

* * *

 

The old Alana never kissed a woman in her whole life. She was resolutely heterosexual, a lover of men. She loved the way they smelled, their rough hands, their charming companion nature, the way she felt like a different person when she was intimate with them.

Margot Verger makes her first statement an innuendo, and doesn't stop there. She lives like someone from another culture, one where the default isn't male. Her jokes are unapologetically gynocentric, she has a full bodied laugh and loves things completely. She is unpretentiously a woman's woman. She talks about her ex-girlfriend easily, openly, flippantly, as if it was no longer scandalous. She and Alana become fast friends, Margot always flirtatious but never inappropriate.

Alana learns to watch her, over dinner and lunch and cocktails, watching the way she ticks and learning the component parts of her psyche. Margot is great company, and Alana feels like, if not her old self, a more complete new self, a new self that has fewer negative emotions. Someone who may, one day, be able to smile widely again. Who, if she cannot move lightly and casually, can at least act that way.

It is at lunch that Alana watches Margot’s eyes track the full bosom of the waitress as she pours their third glasses of wine. The wine is red like Margot's lips, red like her rare steak, red like her passion. The waitress gives Margot an appreciative look back in return, and  Margot finds a slip of a note under her dessert plate. She hands it over with a quirked eyebrow and a wide smile, and it is filth, something about having this girl for dessert if the tarte au citron doesn't satisfy.

When Margot eats the final bite of the really very good tarte, and pushes her seat back, winking at Alana and topping up her glass as concilliation. As she walks past, a shimmy of her hips to slip between the tightly packed tables of the bistro, Alana reaches out on autopilot, suddenly furious that Margot would not see what Alana had only just realised herself and catches her wrist, holding tight. She pulls until Margot is low in front of her, bending down low. Margot’s face absolutely alight with joy, and Alana kisses her as hard as she can with all the courage in her bones.

"I thought dessert was very good.” she croaks, her throat suddenly dry with adrenaline and shock at her own boldness. “We should give our compliments to the chef."

They can't get into the pantry, but the now openly dejected waitress hands them the key to the bathroom. Alana makes it there without her cane, leaning heavily on Margot in a way that makes her look drunk. The door is locked behind them and they kiss frantically, passionately, hands cupping breasts and touching soft wafts of hair, the perfect curve of waist and hip, the many different textures of a woman fully dressed. Alana uses the wall and all her willpower to stay up until Margot works Alana's tight pencil skirt up her thighs to get at her cunt in record time.

Alana's knees don't even have time to buckle after her strength is exhausted, Margot is prepared, holding her with strength that is carefully hidden beneath beauty. For the first time in a very long time, Alana feels she can let go, and the first touch of Margot's perfect tongue to her clit and she comes off, embarrassingly overstimulated after coming alive after nearly a year of concentrated living through pain.

When she looks in the mirror, the red of Margot's lipstick is ground into the grain of her skin and her hair is askew and she thinks she has never looked more beautiful. Her legs wobble more, but Margot kisses her brazenly on the neck, a comical red lip print sticking out against the dark brush of her half-undone hair.

They get the bill, and then a hotel room they don't leave for two days.

Margot is sweet and kind behind closed doors, and touches Alana with greed and well earned entitlement. She is a tempest, a queen, perfect pouting lips that have to be attached to something, but she is patient. Alana apologises the first time she goes down on her, pressing her face between Margot’s perfect, humid thighs, so unsure of whether she can do what so many men in her life had struggled to do and make her come. Margot is vocal, giving feedback, helping Alana move her head to a perfect angle without being pushy or disrespectful. Alana feels throughout the whole experience like she is being inducted rather than instructed, introduced rather than seduced.

Margot is as much a lady of leisure as Alana is, and so they have grand adventures when the frustration of finding Hannibal Lecter becomes too much. The Verger family own a carriage, and so Margot likes to hitch up her favourite horses and take Alana round the grounds, then press her into a pile of blankets and make her scream echo off the hills. They go to New York and check into the suite at the Waldorf-Astoria, spend a weekend spending ridiculous amounts of money and drinking martinis in skyscrapers, pressing lipstick kisses onto the skyline. They go to Vegas and put it all on red. They soften. Alana perfects her cunnilingus and Margot buys a new harness and fucks Alana against the cool sheets of their hotel room, her phallus purposely chosen to be perfect for the secret topography of Alana’s sex.

Sometimes though, it is just difficult, and their life becomes dominated by the normal relationship events that happen in times of difficulty. For every stolen kiss between hours of pouring through bank records finding a lead, a meal shared, a glance, a shared laugh, there is the way Margot hates her brother to the point it poisons her soul, the way she aggressively mourns her lost fertility, mourns her lost child with the man they both share history with like a bad novel, puts up walls that Alana hasn’t the mental energy to break down. But they are a team, evident in every gesture, every movement as time goes on. It’s the way that Margot rubs her back when the opulent yet unergonomic chairs that litter the Verger family homestead cause it to spasm, the way she hands over painkillers with a twist of her mouth that says she cares, the way she calls better and better doctors to her bedside and holds her hand and talks nonsense when Alana can’t get out of bed for a week.

They go to New York again for the spring shows, and walk past city hall just as two jubilant brides burst through the hallowed doors, surrounded by applauding friends and family. Alana starts to look at the Tiffany’s website in stolen moments. She decides that Margot would prefer Cartier, but bookmarks some rings just in case.

Margot has never stopped plotting. Her brother, this nexus at the heart of their world that controls money and influence, who brought them together to fallow earth, killing everything good he touches. He is wizened, and she is wily. She deliberately loosens up her appearance, borrowing some of Alana’s old dresses, slipping into the shoes of a women she never knew.

Margot insists on taking her away to plot, and so they go to New Orleans, where Margot’s hair goes wild in the humidity, and they make their escape plan in a cheap hotel room under assumed names. They are booked into a suite in the French Quarter with Mason’s money, somewhere where his lackeys can watch them. Alana makes an appointment with her gynaecologist, and they buy a cattle prod on ebay, giggling under the influence of cheap fizzy wine, and then go out for hurricanes, twin dark haired storms walking arm in arm up the boulevard.

 

**Author's Note:**

> So its become a bit of a Friday night tradition that I sit on the balcony with a couple of glasses of red wine and write fic.  
> If you've read my other fics, you probably know that I LOVE Alana, and really all the ladies of Hannibal. That said, I was seriously disappointed with how the Alana/Margot relationship was dealt with on the show (1 innuendo and a frankly weird sex scene) that I decided I had to write them a courtship.  
> The title is a famous french saying, 'after me, comes the deluge'. It has been associated with the French king Louis XV, or his mistress Madame de Pompadour, but it either means 'after I am finished everything gets fucked up' or 'it doesn't matter if it all gets fucked up, I'll be dead by then' depending on how you interpret the grammar (more on this [here](http://tradicionclasica.blogspot.co.uk/2006/01/expression-aprs-moi-le-dluge-and-its.html)). In this case I lean towards the first meaning, because I have always wanted Alana to be Plot Important and bust the whole thing right open.
> 
> Come hang out with me on tumblr at [cicaklah.tumblr.com](http://cicaklah.tumblr.com) where I predict that this week I'll be blogging about how much I love Alana's wardrobe.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[podfic] Après moi, le déluge](https://archiveofourown.org/works/7310155) by [KeeperofSeeds](https://archiveofourown.org/users/KeeperofSeeds/pseuds/KeeperofSeeds)




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